Word: colonels
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...boxes and camouflage-fabric campaign chairs in a tight semicircle. The news was good. The enemy was said to be caught in a tightening cordon. Local Sunni insurgents - they claimed to be members of the 1920 Revolution Brigades - had helped to clear the Buhritz neighborhood. After the briefing, Lieut. Colonel Bruce Antonia told me, "Usually everybody's shooting at us. This is the first time we've had any of them on our side...
...Some al-Qaeda elements overplayed their hand in other ways as well, demanding marriage to the daughters of local sheiks, forcibly recruiting teenagers as suicide bombers and imposing Shari'a law - including a ban on Western dress and smoking. "Last fall Army Colonel Sean MacFarland, the brigade commander in Ramadi, was approached by Sheik Abdul Sattar Buzaigh al-Rishawi," Petraeus said. "Several of the sheik's relatives had been killed by al-Qaeda. The story is, MacFarland guaranteed Abdul Sattar's security by putting an M1 tank section in [his] front yard and [a] police station across the street...
...lieutenant colonel named Bruce Antonia told Odierno about preparing to attack the Buhritz neighborhood a few nights earlier when he was approached by local Sunni inusurgents-members, they said, of the 1920 Revolutionary Brigades-who were streaming out of the neighborhood. "They said they'd been fighting al-Qaeda but had run out of ammunition and asked us to supply them. We told them, 'Show us where AQ is and we'll fight them.'" The insurgents did and the neighborhood was cleared...
...second lieutenant colonel named Avanulis Smiley picked up the story from there, "Sir, they've also showed us seven buried IED sites. They gave us specific information-description of the houses, gate color, tree trunks...
...After the briefing I asked Colonel Antonia if he'd asked the Sunnis why they had turned against al-Qaeda. "They said it was religious stuff," he said. "AQI demanded that the women wear abayas, no smoking and they preached an extreme version of Islam in the mosque. They'd also spent the winter without food and fuel because of the violence al-Qaeda was causing. One guy said to me, 'We fought against you because you invaded our country and you're infidels. But you treat us with more dignity than al-Qaeda,' and he said they'd continue...